The increasing popularity of the Internet has led to the emergence of online merchants, online libraries, and even online medical and insurance businesses, along with people who wish to share information with one or more of their friends. Each of these uses of the Internet may employ a website that is configured to enable access to information by others. Each of the website owners may also desire to provide secure communications and access to at least some of the information and activities associated with their website. Moreover, for various reasons, these website owners may desire to have a domain name that is uniquely associated with their website.
Today, websites may be made available using a variety of server implementations. For example, some individuals, and businesses, may select to implement a shared server to host their website. Such shared hosting of websites, also called virtual hosting, typically employs a server that is configured to host more than one domain name while sharing computing resources, such as bandwidth, memory, or the like. Such a configuration may, depending on the speed and configuration of the server, be able to host thousands of websites, each with individual domain names, but employing the same Internet Protocol (IP) network address.
However, many implementations of virtual hosting may have problems with respect to providing secure communications between an end-user and a hosted website. For example, a traditional method of providing secure communications between the end-user employing a web browser and a website is to establish an encrypted connection. Encrypted connections may be implemented using a variety of secure communication protocols, including Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, or the like. These protocols typically include a handshaking procedure where the website may be authenticated by the client device. In one such procedure, the server device provides a digital certificate for the website to the client device.
In a virtual hosting environment, however, the particular hosted website that is to be requested may not be known during the handshaking procedure. Thus, the virtual host server may not know which digital certificate is to be provided for authentication of the hosted website. One proposed solution has been to assign a unique IP address to each of the hosted websites. However, because of the expense of registering and maintaining such global IP addresses, as well as other reasons, this solution may not always be appropriate. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.